Abstract
STUDIES IN THE AGE OF CHAUCER Prioress refer particularly, if confusedly, to that terrible event. Still an other version of the blood libel, in this case drawn from twentieth century bigotry, would also have been appropriate to Rex's discussion, although perhaps not available at the time: Elisabeth Orsten's account of a modern parallel, described in Florilegium 11 (1992). Of course, the evidence, even in its incomplete state in Rex's book, only serves to problematize the question still farther-why has Chaucer seen fit to make the Prioress take the hardest possible line in her narra tion? Ifwe reject-as who will not?-the possibility that Chaucer him self was a hard-liner, why has he gone out ofhis way to depict Madame Eglentyne as such? Is it to force the audience to see the Prioress as a hyp ocrite of the worst sort-proclaiming her devotion to the Virgin, tra ditionally a fount of mercy and compassion, yet reveling in vengeance upon those she hates? It is tempting, in such considerations, to fall back on the obvious, in particular the citing of GP 133-35 in conjunction with Matthew 23:25. One of the features of Rex's crisply written, suc cinctly argued book is that he steers clear of stating the obvious. One last quibble, or perhaps commendation. The author of this ex cellent book is very sparing in his secondary references. Yet can one eas ily escape a sense ofabsence in discovering, in a book about a fictive ac count of a fourteenth-century prioress, the absence of any citation to Eileen Power's 1922 classic, Medieval English Nunneries? DOUGLAS WURTELE Carleton University A.V. C. SCHMIDT, ed. Piers Plowman: A Parallel-Text Edition ofthe A, B, C, and Z Versions. Vol. I. Text. London and New York: Longman, 1995. Pp. xv, 762. $199.95. This is a welcome book. Recent study of Piers Plowman has often em phasized moving beyond the individual versions of the poem and con sidering the work (i.e., Langland's imaginative life) as a single develop ing whole. We have been hampered in this pursuit by the absence ofany modern equivalent to Skeat's great parallel-text edition of 1886,1 a de1 Walter W. Skeat, ed., The Vision of William Concerning Piers the Plowman in Three Parallel Texts, 2 vols. (London: Oxford University Press, 1886). 294 REVIEWS ficiency Schmidt and Longman now seek to remedy. We can, of course, no longer rely upon Schmidt's self-avowed model, for Skeat's work has become passe because ofthe narrowness ofhis evidentiary basis for pre senting the poem and because ofthe development ofmore powerful ed itorial tools for studying the textual tradition (an advance due to the work of R. W. Chambers and his students, in the main of George Kane).2 Thus, all students ofLangland must be in the debt ofeditor and pub lisher. Once again, as previously for B. A. Windeatt's opulent Troilus and Criseyde, medievalists owe Longman profuse thanks. A Parallel-Text Edition represents an extraordinary risk venture by a commercial pub lisher-a central (and very lengthy) text promulgated in a form sub jected to scholarly scrutiny and accompanied by a substantial variant apparatus. And the book has been handsomely produced, with legible type and ample margins. Yet in terms ofscholarly scrutiny, ofSchmidt's work as an editor, this may eventually prove an unwelcome book. At this time, one cannot offer a definitive reading, quite simply because describing this volume as "sparse in explanation" is generous. The book is precisely what the title promises, text and collations only. Even though providing it here would not have substantially increased the size of a very large volume, "A full account of editorial procedure will be found in Volume II, Introduction" (p. xiii). Indeed, even page [xv}, the only information of fered to guide a reader in using the volume, has the look of an after thought. It occurs on the otherwise unused last leaf ofthe sixteen-page front matter-and is unpaginated and not typeset in the normal format. Moreover, even with the information provided, I find Schmidt's colla tion frequently impossible to follow. One's...
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